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It shows the rate at which carbon emissions would decrease to keep global heat below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
We can either reduce carbon emissions by half in the next few year and eliminate them almost entirely by 2040. Or we can prepare for high levels of heating that will transform Earth’s existence before our children reach their late 20s.
This, at least, is what all reputable climate science tells us; and it has to be said that the evidence before our eyes – notably the current shocking spring heatwave across northern India and Pakistan – suggests that the predictions are if anything too optimistic. And it’s against this backdrop of absolute crisis that I am often moved to wonder just what is wrong with many of the world’s politicians, who fully acknowledge – at events like the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, just six months ago – that this change needs to be made; but somehow always have an excuse or a sophistical argument to hand, when it comes to making it.
The UK is a prime example of this dangerous generation climate sophists. BusinessEnergy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, who in theory, like the rest of Boris Johnson’s government, is fully signed up to the idea of low-carbon transition; but in practice has recently become a vigorous advocate for further expansion of the UK’s offshore oil and gas industry, including the much-debated Cambo field.
Kwarteng was confronted last week by climate activists who demanded a quick exit from oil and natural gas. “Shout and scream all you like,” he responded on Twitter, “but I’m not going to put Britain’s energy security at risk by shutting off domestic oil and gas production”; and he added that we would need to burn oil and gas “for decades to come”, and should therefore, in the interests of energy security, be sourcing it from our own North Sea and North Atlantic.
Well of course, it’s always pleasant to have a Conservative minister confirm just how vital energy resources located off Scotland are to the economic future of these islands.
Kwarteng’s environmental statements are, however, simply wrong. We cannot continue to burn oil and gas “for decades to come”, without horrific consequences; and insofar as we will need North Sea oil and gas over the next decade or so, to help us transition to and invest in future renewable energy systems – well no-one, despite Kwarteng’s predictable caricature of his opponents, is asking him to “shut off domestic oil and gas production” immediately, but only to refrain from actually encouraging new fossil fuel exploration and development.
Kwasi Kwarteng is able to see the graphs, read the numbers and can even read them better than anyone else. The man has a Cambridge double and is clearly not fooled.
Yet somehow, the intensity of lobbying from commercial interests desperate to believe that they can somehow maintain business and profits as usual, while combating climate change, overrides both information and intelligence; and leaves Kwarteng not only parroting nonsense about how we need to open up new oil and gas fields, but also, as a sideline, promoting further investment in “new” nuclear power – a form of low-carbon energy which is so investment-intensive, and takes so long to bring online, that there is really now no case at all for investing in it, rather than in much faster and cheaper renewable systems.
I have even heard Kwarteng repeating the desperately out-of-date canard that renewable energy “only works when the sun shines and the wind blows”, a comment which is now true only where there is a complete failure to invest in storage systems; and then he pauses to take a sideswipe at the Scottish GovernmentThis year, in an effort at least to show that they take the climate crisis seriously and decided not to participate this year in a huge offshore industry gathering, Texas. Instead, two Scottish Enterprise officials were sent to assess how serious participants are about the renewables transition.
However, the Scottish Government has its own major problems when it comes cognitive dissonance about climate change.
It has long proven itself unable to stop building new roads; and as I write, it is presiding over a drastic reduction of service levels on Scotland’s newly nationalised railway – far below any level in my adult lifetime – that will inevitably drive thousands away from train travel for good, at a moment when expanding public transport use is supposed to be the highest of priorities.
In truth, it is difficult to point to a single government anywhere – except perhaps in the threatened islands of Oceania – which is really acting as if we face a life-threatening climate emergency; and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is something about this crisis – the combination of scale, complexity, and the requirement for revolutionary change at a moment when most people are still relatively unaffected – that is simply beyond the ability of humankind to manage, both psychologically and politically.
It seems impossible that such a catastrophe could actually be imminent, as it seems like a meteorite is heading towards Earth in many science fiction stories. However, daily life on our planet continues as usual, and in a world full politicians who are happy to ignore the issue, the prospects of our species and many other species here on Earth are becoming increasingly grim.
